The magic that's coming to your browser

I was reading on slashdot an article (actually it's more a blog) about some of the cool things that people can now do with javascript and HTML5 and the like in newer browsers. (Sorry if you're using IE, there may be new versions, but they don't support a lot of this stuff.

Have a look for yourself at some of these:

• Dotty thing
• Wolfenstein 3D
• Video thingee

All of these are pretty cool, and note that they don't need any browser plugins to run (though some of them use external scripts, which is kind of like a plugin). I'll draw your attention to the last one in particular, notice that it doesn't use HTML, but the main page is an svg. People have been talking about how this could be the future of the web (though IE doesn't support svg at all yet AFAIK, so if it will be, it'll be a long time away). You may know of svg as a vector graphics format, wikipedia uses it quite a lot for graphs and things nowadays, where it is inherently better than standard images with pixels and all that, but it is a whole lot more than just a vector graphics format, which is why most browsers haven't fully implemented it yet (it's a whole pile of trickiness).

This could also potentially displace flash, which I'm a bit ambivalent about. At the moment I see some places where flash is used well, but all too many where it is used poorly, and the same could be done with these kind of technologies. Also, flash is a whole lot more mature that this, so it can do a whole lot more at the moment (you may have noticed the above could be quite CPU intensive), but there is good competition in the browser space so these should improve rapidly.

I hope you enjoyed my plagiarism of a slashdot article, and a bit of inane ramble.